


the clockwork man

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyborgs, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Body Horror, Cyborgs, During Canon, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Corvo Attano, I guess that's body modification???, I mean Corvo gets turned into a robot??, Kissing, M/M, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Past Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin, Pre-Dishonored (Video Game), Robot Body Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-06 09:09:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12814278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: “I chose you for a reason, Piero. Don’t disappoint me now.” The Outsider tsks.Joplin’s pulse is thudding in his ears. His clockwork had lived, but it wasn’t alive.There is something different about the clockwork man tonight, wasn’t there?It had a face, Joplin realizes with a start. Not a face that he recognized, but a face nonetheless, dark brown eyes staring up into the nothingness unblinkingly, skin bronze against the shocking white enamel of the augmentations.“It has to be alive,” Joplin whispers. “A soul. It needs… a soul.”The Outsider’s face twists into a smile.(In which Corvo Attano is a clockwork man: forged from flesh and metal in equal parts.)





	1. of flesh and metal

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely have very little concept of how long this piece will ultimately be--every chapter I post is a work in its own right, and represents a complete section of the narrative, but posting them as individual works within a series would get confusing.

_A clockwork man, forged from equal parts flesh and metal._

The image terrorizes Joplin at night, its twisted innards exposed in a slick of blood and oil as it lay out on a flat slate altar, a leering metal skull floating in the never-ending darkness above the altar. Watching. Waiting.

When he goes to touch it, it jerks, as if alive, but it wears no face to portray any emotion: just a blank expanse of glazed ceramic, like an unpainted doll’s face, like a mask. Nail-sized pins hold it to the altar like a dissected specimen, pierced through muscle and metal alike, but the slices that expose the… mechanism’s viscera are jagged, sloppy.

There is always Joplin’s dissection tool kit on the altar: a neatly arranged tray of scalpels and blades and scissors.

For the first week Joplin has this nightmare, he is too afraid of the thing to look at it for too long, let alone try to examine it.

Is this the divine inspiration Joplin has sought for so long? The Outsider, reaching out from the Void, after Joplin has waited so many years?

Was this to be his magnum opus?

It takes twenty nights before Joplin is finally able to slide his scalpel through the mechanism’s flesh, to try to understand it. The Outsider would not give a purposeless vision.

And so Joplin resolves that he will put aside his fear.

* * *

His first attempts are all butcheries. Joplin understands the theory, but the execution is another matter entirely.

He goes through fifteen different hounds before he yields even a single one that successfully reanimates—and even then, it cannot move, only whimper pathetically. He tries shooting the damn thing to shut it up, but that does nothing. Joplin has to decapitate it and burn the pieces to kill it.

There are small mercies: so long as Joplin keeps his… employers stocked with the anti-plague elixir, no one cares much what he does in his workshop or how he spends his money. The worst that happens is that Lydia complains that his workshop smells of rotting meat.

But there are complications too: even once Joplin’s twenty-seventh attempt succeeds, and he has finally built a hound that responds the same as any living one, the visions of the clockwork man do not cease.

He understands what the Outsider is trying to tell him, but Joplin loathes the idea. He has never had a terribly strong stomach, and finding a good supply of human corpses will be harder than bribing the mudlarks into bringing the hounds directly to him instead of the pub’s fighting ring.

But Joplin finds himself unable to rest, his sleep plagued by the vision, until he finds himself in the seediest parts of Dunwall, slipping an entire pouch of coin into the palm of a gravedigger. A guaranteed supply of fresh human corpses, intended for interment in one of the paupers’ mass graves, but now delivered to his workshop.

* * *

The first dozen humans fare no better than the first few hounds. A hound was a relatively simple creature, in comparison, and there are so many things that can go wrong: mis-wired connections, an electrical overcharge, joints that didn’t line up properly, dozens and dozens of problems.

Eventually, though, almost a full year since he began having the vision, Joplin succeeds: a clockwork man.

But even here, something is wrong. It is uglier than the mechanism Joplin sees in the Void, and it wears the face of a young aristocratic plague victim.

And it is not alive.

Yes, it has a heart that beats, and a body that moves, but its motor functions are dictated by the program Joplin has written. It _lives_ , but it is not _alive_.

That night, after locking the thing up, Joplin has the vision again.

This time, though, something is different: the Outsider is there. Hovering beside the silver skull, arms folded over His chest, staring down at Joplin with fathomless black eyes.

“Do you understand now, Piero?” the Outsider says, and His voice echoes in Joplin’s ears. “Do you see what is missing in your creation?”

“It needs…” Joplin pauses, looking down at the mechanical man that stretches out below the Outsider’s feet. “It needs something else. What does it need?”

“I chose you for a reason, Piero. Don’t disappoint me now.” The Outsider tsks.

Joplin’s pulse is thudding in his ears. His clockwork had lived, but it wasn’t alive.

There is something different about the mechanism tonight, wasn’t there?

It had a face, Joplin realizes with a start. Not a face that he recognized, but a face nonetheless, dark brown eyes staring up into the nothingness unblinkingly, skin a deep bronze against the shocking white enamel of the augmentations.

“It has to be alive,” Joplin whispers. “A soul. It needs… a soul.”

The Outsider’s face twists into a smile.

“Don’t make me do this. Please, Outsider, don’t make me do this to a living man.” He was an engineer, not a physician. Could a human even survive the procedure? And if Joplin didn’t manage to kill them…

With a lurch of his stomach, Joplin realizes that it wasn’t an exercise in how far reanimation could be pushed at all. He’d misunderstood the purpose of the vision, hadn’t he?

It was about building something new, wasn’t it? The dismembered hound hadn’t died until Joplin turned on the furnace. The corpses could go on for as long as their charge allowed; their bodies would push on no matter what their condition, and their augmentations could experience no pain.

If a man was taken apart and put back together with clockwork parts, a man with a soul, with a working brain…

“Why would you give me this vision?” croaks Joplin, staring up at the Outsider.

The Outsider’s expression yields no answer, and He turns away, taking steps up an invisible staircase into the depths of the Void. “You will know when the time is ready, Piero. Everything in its time.”

Joplin shakes his hands after the god. “Why would you do this?” he shouts.

But as was the way of all gods, the Outsider offers no answer to the questions that do not please Him.


	2. reincarnation

The visions stop.

Joplin does not think of a clockwork man for a year, though he has drawn the exact schematics he would need in feverish bursts of mania and written down contact information for the best surgeons who would do anything for the right amount of coin in the very backs of his journals.

Instead, he builds a mask (a silver skull, leering, lined with canvas, the same one that hung over the mechanism in the Void), a folding sword of fine steel. When Lydia and the other cleaning girls from the pub come into his workshop to bring him fresh linens and his meals, they ask him why he needs a sword, why he’s made such a frightening mask.

Joplin has no answer, beyond that the things weren’t for him—who they were for, Joplin doesn’t know, either.

_You will know when the time is ready, Piero._

* * *

In the end, it’s a little girl—an aristocrat’s daughter, clearly, wearing a fine silver bracelet and an outfit that was once white but is now splattered with blood and mud—who brings Joplin the right body.

“Please,” she sobs, shoving open the door to his workshop. “My father’s hurt, and there was a boy who said you would help.”

“Where is he?” Joplin is no physician, but the girl is in distress, and her words— _a boy who said you could help_ —stir the vision of the mask and the mechanism again, somehow.

“By the river, please, come fast.” She darts out of the doorway before Joplin has a chance to ask her any more questions, and it is not until Joplin sees the body lying in the muddy riverbank that he understands.

The girl’s father has the same face the clockwork man had worn, that night in the Void.

The girl is still sobbing: “Can you help Corvo? Please, I’m so scared, Mother is dead, I think. I ran as fast as I could, and the boy helped me carry Corvo, but it was so cold. Will Corvo be alright?”

Joplin hushes her as he rolls her father over. His body is a ruin, for the most part, and that the blood loss hasn’t killed him is astounding, considering how his left calf hangs loosely from where it should join with his knee and the sickening limpness of his right arm.

The signet ring is what startles Joplin the most. The Imperial seal.

Which means—and certainly, if the girl wasn’t caked in grime, if her hair was neatly styled, she would bear a shocking resemblance to the Imperial Princess, but the Tower was a good half hour’s walk on the riverfront from the Hound Pits, and what in the Void was she blubbering on about?

“Go into the pub, and tell the woman behind the counter to send for Dr. Nikolayev,” Joplin says, tugging what he was now quite sure was the Royal Protector towards the dock. “And then meet me in my workshop, right away, don’t talk to anyone else.”

The girl nods and dashes off. “Thank you,” she shouts behind her.

“I wouldn’t say thanks yet,” Joplin mumbles.

* * *

Nikolayev does good, solid work, and so long as his pockets are kept full of coin, he doesn’t ask why Joplin is having him do what he’s doing.

By the time Joplin is finished and Nikolayev evicts Joplin from his own workshop to finish up the last surgical touches, the girl is asleep on the top floor of the Hound Pits, tucked in by Callista with promises that her father would be alright.

 _Little Emily Kaldwin_ , _Princess of the Empire of the Isles_.

Their Empress-to-be, if the gossip that Cecelia had heard from a friend who worked in the Tower kitchens was true: the Empress Jessamine had been assassinated by persons unknown, her Royal Protector Lord Attano and little daughter gone missing, and the entirety of Dunwall’s ruling elite was trying to cover the entire incident up for as long as possible.

Emily may not recognize her father when she wakes in the morning. Joplin had been as careful as possible, but if the Outsider was merciful this would be both the first and final time that Joplin had to perform this procedure.

 The ugliness of the steel plating could not be avoided, nor could the jagged incisions that were sure to fade into heavy scars be prevented. At least Joplin had been able to leave most of Attano’s face intact.

Attano’s heart beat on through the entire process, never faltering. Joplin’s own stomach twists in his gut: yes, the Protector was living, but only once the sedative wore off would he be able to see if the Outsider had been right.

If finally Joplin had made a clockwork man that not only lived, but was alive.

_Everything in its time._

* * *

(Despite his fractured arm, they only managed to pin Corvo down when they landed a slice into the vulnerable space at the back of his knee.  Corvo had been forced to lie there, on the cold stone, watching as their leader gutted Jessamine and left her to collapse in a pool of her own gore, watching her desperate last seconds, watching as Emily fled with a scream—

 _Hello, Corvo._ The cool, sea-scented whispers of the Void, a young man with pitch-black eyes. The Outsider.

 _Am I dying?_ Corvo thought, and the Outsider laughed, but He offered no answer.

 _Your life has taken a turn, has it not? The Empress is dead, her precious daughter Emily has run off somewhere in the city, and you—you lie dying in the palace gardens. But you aren’t done with this world yet._ The Outsider touches a frozen hand to Corvo’s forehead with a wan smile. _No, I cannot undo what’s happened here. I cannot unweave the fabric of time._

 _Then why bother coming here?_ Corvo groaned and tried to roll over, but found he could no longer move anything lower than the midpoint of his back.

 _Because you still have a role to play in all of this._ The Outsider grinned, and Corvo could wear His teeth were as sharp as a hagfish’s. _Know, Corvo, that I am watching… with great interest._ )


	3. the god shall descend

Havelock, Pendleton—they’re all terrified of him.

And Corvo can’t blame them: they’ve seen when he was first reborn, when he’d been stretched out on the table in the workshop, the metal and enamel glittering in the blue flicker of whale oil lamps. Where there was no pretending that Corvo was a man.

None of them can look Corvo in the eyes.

It doesn’t matter. Corvo is only their means to an end, and when he’s outlived his usefulness, they will discard him.

They all know it, though Havelock blusters and insists otherwise.

They don’t seem him as a man. Joplin had built Corvo from broken bone and steel, which made him _a thing_. An _it_ , as if Corvo was simply a ghost, haunting a mechanical vessel. Something they could wield as a weapon against the Lord Regent.

 _“_ Did you know, dear Corvo, that your simple existence has forced Overseer Martin back into his religious studies?” The Outsider, draped against Corvo’s bed—Corvo doesn’t need a bed, doesn’t need sleep, but the emptiness of his room over the pub had upset Emily—with the faint whalesong of the Void echoing in the distance. Corvo is sitting at a chair at his desk, re-assembling his delicate right wrist joint where an Overseer had tried to slice it away earlier in the night, when he’d seen Corvo lurking in the shadows of the High Overseer’s office.

“Do you have a soul, Martin asks himself, kneeling before the incense to meditate for the first time in a decade. Did it die when you became clockwork? Did it die when the Empress died, in that marble gazebo? Or…” And the Outsider leers, stretching like a pleased cat amid Corvo’s sheets. “Do you still have one, and is it simply unbothered by the blood you spill so readily?”

“I do what they ask.” Corvo pops his hand back into place with a click, flexing his fingers into a fist a few times to test the connection. They all move in synch, enamel-plated whalebone clicking together with a skittering sound.

“That’s what unnerves Martin the most… The notion that all wickedness might be human, and not My doing. If I am not the source of evil in this world, then what is?”

Corvo tugs the leather glove back over his hand. “Never liked philosophy.”

“Of course not.” The Outsider smiles as He rolls upright. “You wouldn’t be half as interesting if you cared about Me, about the Mark.”

“All means lead to an end,” Corvo recites flatly. Philosophy was a luxury for people with spare time, people who had the opportunity to think about their decisions before they made them.

Spilling blood had never bothered Corvo before. Why should it bother him now? And whether Corvo spilled it with blade or bullet or bolt, with magic or with his hands—why did the method matter? “I was built to kill,” and there is no bitterness or malice behind Corvo’s words. “If I refuse to kill, there’s no reason for me to exist.”

“You were built for many reasons.” The Outsider steps towards Corvo, thin hands pulling Corvo’s exposed right one between them. The god presses His lips to the delicate machinery of Corvo’s hand.

If Corvo was allowed a single grievance with his new clockwork body, it was that he felt no sensation. He can imagine the Outsider’s fingers are chilled—like everything in the Void—and His lips must be dry, but Corvo feels nothing.

“Your daughter is looking for you,” the Outsider murmurs, His lips still brushing against whalebone fingertips. “She found a little dandelion plant, down the by waterside. It was just starting to blossom. She picked a bud for you.”

Corvo’s gaze slides to the window, where Pendleton is shooting empty Old Dunwall bottles with Havelock in the yard, and Emily—as the Outsider had said—is skipping back from docks, something clenched in her fist.

“She knows that you are not asleep when you sit in the bed, next to her.” The Outsider’s black eyes slide up to meet Corvo’s as He reaches for the leather glove Corvo normally wears. “When you try to soothe her night terrors with gentle touch and kind words, like her mother might have done. But the ticking of your body is not the same as a heartbeat.” The Outsider slides the glove over Corvo’s hand with a quiet sigh.

The gesture would have been intimate, Corvo thinks, if a god and the ruins of a man could have a moment of intimacy.

“Why do you tell me things like that?” Corvo whispers. “Do you do this to all of your Marked, your chosen?”  

And the Outsider smiles, but He says nothing else, and vanishes into purple-black smog like He was never there at all.

* * *

There is a pathetic gurgling as Corvo yanks his blade free from the youngest Pendleton’s chest, the aristocrat gasping as his lungs filled with flood and he fell backwards to the floor of the Golden Cat.

Corvo shrugs off his jacket, picks his left arm from the floor and, grimacing, pops it back into place. Unlike the delicate joints of his hand and wrists, his arms were designed to be easily pulled into and out of place in his shoulder. He clenches his left hand into a fist, the Outsider’s Mark materializing on the back of his black leather glove with a faint blue-tinged flash.

There are advantages to Corvo’s new body, to be certain.

The resilience is perhaps the most obvious of them all: not even a bullet shot through his chest could slow him down, and any damage done can be fixed—if not by Corvo’s own crude self-repair skills, then by Joplin, stretching Corvo out on a wooden work table like one of the Sokolov creations the inventor had taken to tinkering with.

Custis had put up a valiant fight. He might have even succeeded in seriously maiming Corvo, if there had been any parts of Corvo left to maim, and certainly at stalling him for long enough for the better-equipped guards to arrive, if Corvo hadn’t left a trail of their corpses in his wake. As it was, Corvo had had to drive his sword through Custis’s chest one-handed, since he’d succeeded in pulling Corvo’s left arm from its socket.

Morgan had been weak and cried for mercy the moment that he’d seen Corvo, promising him wealth, jewels, whatever it was that Corvo could desire. He hadn’t even bothered to draw his pistol against Corvo.

Custis’s blood runs down the back of Corvo’s glove, into the workings of his arm. Would it be warm, if he could feel it sliding along his tendon-springs and metal framework? Would it repulse him? Corvo had never been afraid of blood before, but he also had always been certain to keep his hands clean of it.

His thoughts have turned to philosophy, and Corvo has no time for that. He rolls his shoulder one more time, to test the connection, and then he Blinks to the windowsill.

There is still work to be done.

* * *

“Calling my thoughts romantic would be a misnomer,” the Outsider says, leaning back against the crumbling plaster wall of Corvo’s room, sitting atop the table where Corvo has assembled a small makeshift shrine from a purple curtain and a small whale oil lamp. Corvo’s collection of bone charms and runes sing softly the whisper of the Void, arranged around the lamp in a roughly circular shape.

“Romance is a human concept?” Corvo guesses. He scrubs a gloved hand over his face. Emily’s night terrors have only gotten worse as time has gone on, and though Corvo no longer can physically feel tired, he is still somehow exhausted. That a god occupies his free time does not help.

“Your concept of romance is tied to your memories of the Empress. Secret walks on beaches in Karnaca at dawn. Private balconies where you might hold her to you in the fresh air. Being allowed public affection during Fugue.” The Outsider’s eyes glance over to Corvo briefly, as if to check that he’s still listening, and He laughs a singular chuckle. “I do not desire any of that.”

Corvo lolls his head against the cool wood of his headboard. “You don’t want me to take you to Serkonos and show you the glowing sea blooms at midnight?” he asks dryly.

“My desires are for your worship,” the Outsider says decisively. He rises from the table, His feet—as ever—hovering an inch or so off the floor, walking on air. “Something I have never had such a problem receiving from any of My Chosen before.”

Corvo gestures at the shrine behind the Outsider. “Worship.”

The Outsider’s eyes flicker, something rippling in their Void-like darkness. He extends His hand out, for Corvo to gently brush his lips against, leave a soft trail of kisses up to His sleeve. “Obsession and desperation are not the same as devotion. A man might have built hundreds of shrines in My name, and I would choose to appear at none of them. But you, Corvo…”

Corvo tugs the Outsider closer by His wrist, unbuttoning His sleeve cuff and pushing it up to expose more pale skin. He has no sexual desire anymore, nothing to arouse in his clockwork body, but the semblance of intimacy is enough. “You created me.” It’s whispered into the Outsider’s skin, like a lover’s secret.

The Outsider’s expression cracks into a wide smile, and Corvo thinks he might have seen the sharp edges of the god’s hungry teeth. “Of course. Do you hate me for it?”

Corvo has a right to loathe Joplin, to loathe the Outsider, for stealing away his humanity.

And yet—he doesn’t.

The god leans over where Corvo’s lying in his bed and drags His chapped lips against Corvo’s forehead. “Anything for your daughter, no matter what she might need from you. I must say, if I was a crueler god, I might consider that a blasphemy… The worship of another idol.” The Outsider laughs again as He slots their mouths together for another kiss, lingering His lips over Corvo’s as He seats Himself in Corvo’s lap.

“How would you have me worship you?” Corvo whispers. Their lips are still brushing.

“Entertain me.” The Outsider tangles one of His hands into Corvo’s hair, pulling the man’s head back to better examine his face, to trace His fingertips along the thick scar tissue around Corvo’s neck. “Give me a good show.”

“Like an actor and a patron.” Corvo lets the Outsider tug him back into another kiss, savoring the saltwater sting of the Outsider’s mouth.

“The most powerful patron in the universe.” The Outsider’s expression is not fond—Corvo is certain the god has no capacity for fondness—but it is warmer than usual. “Best not to miss any cues, Corvo.” And the god, as is His habit, vanishes into nothingness with no further warning.

Emily is bounding up the stairs; Corvo can hear her humming as she runs, taking the steps two at a time.

He had never placed her on a pedestal, had he? Emily was just a child, and she was as prone to being lazy and spoiled as any aristocrat’s favorite daughter. She took delight in annoying her tutors and was petulant, even to Corvo, but Emily was good-hearted and kind, in the end.

And for her, he’d make every last person who’d forced her to watch her mother’s death suffer. He would bleed them all dry. Corvo swallows dryly, reflexively, as he realizes what the Outsider meant.

 _Devotion_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ripped the title from the chants in the "ghost in the shell" & "ghost in the shell: innocence" ost by kenji kawai, which is also where i grabbed the second chapter's title.
> 
> sorry for the... like, non-linear passage of time within these chapters. 
> 
> my posting is going to slow down for a bit (though I keep on writing) as I'm basically working two jobs & doing school full-time for the next like three weeks. 
> 
> talk to me on [on tumblr](http://officialclaricestarling.tumblr.com) | [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/clstarling/) & i'll make joplin give robo-corvo his nervous system back | send me a message on discord @ clstarling#4370

**Author's Note:**

> (chanting quietly) robo-corvo robo-corvo robo-corvo 
> 
> watching "ghost in the shell" when I was twelve was one of my formative experiences as person.
> 
> talk to me on [on tumblr](http://officialclaricestarling.tumblr.com) | [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/clstarling/) & i'll tell you a fact about the world's oldest rug or write you something, whichever you prefer


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